About the Data

We scraped information about the top 500 billionaires of the world for the years 2011 to 2019 and 2021 from Areppim. Areppim is an information website that provides and analyses various kinds of data. It has collected data from Forbes Billionaire List for data before 2019 and Bloomberg Billionaires Index after 2019 (and including).

The variables extracted are as follows:

The data consists of 500 rows across 10 years, thus, 5000 data points with 5 variables along with ordering indicating the rank.

We also have additional variables for every country for 2021:

and for every billionaire:

To create the world map plots, we also created a data frame with the variables:

This data frame consists of 64 countries, the countries which had at least one billionaire in top 500 over the 10 years.

Obtaining the Data

The data was obtained from the following sources:

Look at obtaining_data.html in the Code folder for the code of scraping and processing the data.

Biases in the Data:

Interesting Questions

  1. Which industry should be chosen to become a Billionaire?

  2. Which place produces the most Billionaires?

  3. Who are the top 10 billionaires in different years?

  4. What is the distribution of Net worth among top 500 Billionaires?

  5. In what way has the wealth of the top 10 richest people changed in the pandemic?

  6. What is the distribution of age of the Billionaires?

  7. What is the relation between Number of Billionaires and Population?

  8. What is the relation between Number of Billionaires and GDP?

  9. What is the relation between Billionaires Last change YTD and GDP Growth Rate?

Important Visualisations

Which industry to choose to become a Billionaire?

  • Finance and Retail were the wealthiest industries until Technology overtook them in the recent years.
  • And the Total Net Worth of the Technology increased exponentially in the 2019-21 period.

Which place produces the most Billionaires?

  • China and United States have higher number of billionaires and higher Total Worth than Europian countries. However, the Europian countries have higher Average Net Worth.
  • Africa had the least number of billionaires.

Top 10 Billionaires Race:

  • Everyone’s net worth has increased over the years.
  • Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos jumped to the top positions in the recent years pushing Bill Gates down, with Elon Musk showing an exponential jump over the last 2 years.

Distribution of Net worth among top 500 Billionaires:

  • The Net Worth decreases exponentially as we go to the higher ranks.
  • Even among the top 500, the maximum wealth is congested among the few highest billionaires.

Wealth of worlds 10 richest Doubled in Pandemic

  • A 1.5-2 times jump can be seen in just a span of 2 years during the covid era.

Distribution of age of the Billionaires:

  • The ages of the top 500 billionaires has roughly remain the same for last 10 years.
  • Most of them belong to 40-80 age group.

Relation between Billionaires and their Country’s Data

  • There seems to be no significant relation between Number of Billionaires and Population of the Country.

  • There seems to be a positive corelation between Number of Billionaires and GDP.

  • There seems to be no relation between Billionaires last change YTD and GDPGR.
  • So, the positive correlation between Number of Billionaires and GDP was fully superficial

Male vs Female billionaires of the World

Men vs Women

  • Out of the top billionaires, only 12.9% are women.

Male and Female Distribution

  • The female representation in the worlds’ billionaires has been increasing over the past years.
  • Food and beverages, and Fasion and Retail have the highest proportion of females.

Conclusion

The answers to the posed questions are purely data-driven based on the visualizations. The highlights of our analysis were:

References